A new law is designed to make social media companies work with police to stop the sale of drugs to teenagers.
Companies have to turn over their terms of service to the Attorney General's office and retain records on companies that violate their policies on controlled substance delivery for 90 days. KNX News’ Pete Demetriou spoke to Clayton Cranford, a former Orange County Sheriff Sergeant and cybercrime expert, about the new law.
“The availability for someone to sell you a counterfeit pill via social media and literally driving it to your home is where we are now,” he said. “And students think that a pill that is quote-unquote, a legit fill-in-the-blank pill may in fact be counterfeit, containing fentanyl, and we have way too many people, especially young people, in our communities dying from fentanyl poisoning.”
Cranford said most parents don’t realize how exposed their kids are to drugs and the ability to order them through social media sites.
“I tell parents, tens of thousands of them every year in presentations, that if your child's a middle school or high schooler and they have a few hundred people following them on Instagram or Snapchat, they probably have a drug dealer in their social network,” he said.
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There are preventative steps that parents can take. Cranford said there are apps that parents can download on their kid’s device that will run in the background and can identify activity that may be dangerous, including drug use and drug sales.
He said that expecting the state to stop exposure of teens to fentanyl is unrealistic. Cranford said parents have to take an active role in patrolling their teens' online use if we want to see a decrease in deaths from adulterated pills.
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